Prairie Gifts  

For those of us with rural roots the harvest season offers an opportunity to reflect on the bounty that a good harvest brings to the community.  What follows is a story that took place in mid-20^th century in my home community, a place in the flat prairie land of North Dakota where the horizon is endless, the sunsets are heavenly and the wind never dies.

Norm, his wife, Yvonne, and young daughter, Cheryl, farmed a  of section of land – about 600 acres along the intersection of Hwy 13 and the Berlin Road in LaMoure County, ND. It was a typical farm operation with livestock, beef cattle, a few milk cows, chickens and pigs, barn cats and a farm dog that never met a car he didn’t like.  It was small operation by today’s standards, but a lot for one man to manage by himself in that era.

Everyone loved Norm, a large gregarious man with a big smile, big hands and big heart.

For Norm, no sons made him the sole “engineer” in his company.  Yvonne, a sweet but sickly woman, wasn’t able to be a full partner in the family business. A farm career means independence, no one to “manage” you. It also means no safety net as in “sick leave” with a paycheck when “life happens”.   

In the fall of 1948,“life happened” to Norm and his family.

It was late in the planting / harvest cycle. The hay was cut, baled and stored in those geometric stacks in strategic places on the farm for use in the winter when cattle wouldn’t have free range in the pasture. Wheat and other small grains were safely harvested and shipped to the grain elevator to be sold or stored in grain bins awaiting a better price. The race to the harvest finish line is fraught with tension. Attitude, optimism and a willingness to work long hours in all types of weather is the job description in a farm career where the weather can dictate the outcome.

 It was just such a tension filled day as Norm was racing to finish the corn harvest when he found his hand caught in the corn picker sidelining him for the rest of the season. Farm accidents are so common in this profession that no one is surprised when it happens.  Every farmer knows it could happen to him or her.

This is where the “it takes a village” concept enters in.

Someone put out a call for volunteers. The local banker took donations.  The local gas station provided the fuel and 22 neighbors left their fields and showed up with their rigs to finish the harvest AND do the remainder of the fall field work for Norm and his family. Neighbor women showed up with hearty homemade food to serve the hungry workers and children kept the workers stocked with fresh water and coffee.

Memories were made, service was modeled and a farm family’s financial future was saved. The deeper meaning here is that political, religious (Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Reorganized Church of the Latter Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witness)  and ethnic (Old-stock American, German, Germans from Russia, Norwegian, Swedish , Polish) biases were set aside to work together as a community with a common goal.

 It was a long day of cooperation and sharing on that farm where someone took the leadership and everyone agreed to set their own needs aside and help another. No one pointed a finger at the victim declaring it was his own darn fault.  No one said “I’m too good to care about them.”  No one said “it’s not my business.”  Everyone participating that day believed they had a social responsibility to care for a neighbor – to do what they could.

I’m pretty sure everyone left that day feeling good about their world.

Carol Just, Fall 2011

Prairie Tribute

Alvin Reinhold Just was born 3.10.1911 in rural McIntosh County, ND. The 3rd child, 2nd son of Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just, Uncle Reinhold, would have been 100-yrs-old this week. I write this to honor a most beloved man on the centennial of his birth.

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When I was a girl on our farm in North Dakota, I lived with my parents and four siblings, wrapped in the arms of a loving family.

Then, there was my “bonus” family a ½ mile to the west where Uncle Reinhold, Aunt Lydia and their three sons farmed. Their only daughter died at birth in 1941 so I got to be “their girl”. Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia were my Godparents and a favorite aunt and uncle to all of us.

Growing up in that place and time, I felt loved and nurtured, guided with a gentle hand as I learned, by example, about the satisfaction that comes from hard work, about acting with integrity, about family values and about how to live a moral life.

Our families, with Uncle Ephraim, Aunt Marion and their family another two miles south, were an extension of each other. Helping one another in the planting/harvest cycle, butchering and sausage making, attending church events….the families seemed one. Memories of the many holiday meals together as I was growing up kept me from despair when I left the fold and moved away. Leaving always makes a person value the things we took for granted before we knew better.

My father, Julius, was just three years younger, but Uncle Reinhold always seemed somehow ‘the elder,” for more than chronological reasons.

Maybe it was because he was the first one to leave his family of origin, a sad, direction-less group of orphans in McIntosh County, held hostage by an angry stepfather and a culture that discouraged challenging the patriarchal system.


Karl and Katharina with (from left) Ephraim, Adam, Aldina, Reinhold, Julius

Uncle Reinhold was about 12-yrs-old in 1923 when the family began to unravel. His father, Karl, and three little sisters died within days of one another due to Influenza and a raging Diphtheria epidemic. As if that wasn’t enough for the remaining six children to cope with, their mother, Katharina, overwhelmed with grief and struggling to keep the family farm afloat, married their Uncle Christof. The uncle was carrying his own unspeakable grief having lost his wife, Christina (sister to their father Karl) and their three sons in the same ruthless epidemic.
Katharina gave birth to a boy, Edwin, in November 1925 and died doing so. Reinhold was 14-years-old. The surviving children, ages 2 – 16 were left to cope in an environment so dynamically different from their early years with Karl and Katharina that they simply operated in survival mode. The stepfather, hardened by the tragedy of his own life, turned his anger toward his stepsons. There were no societal advocates for children in the 1920’s so they could only endure. Uncle Reinhold hated injustice and often took the verbal and physical blows intended for the others. It hardened him to the outside world while the tender inner part of his soul was somehow compartmentalized until it was safe to expose it.    




Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just homestead, rural Zeeland, McIntosh Cty, ND


 Life for Uncle Reinhold and his siblings was a kind of war zone. Growing up, we children heard the cruel stepfather stories. What the brothers couldn’t bring themselves to share – it was just too painful – was the loneliness and grief they never fully processed over the loss of what was a happy early childhood with parents who loved their children and each other. Parents who were tender and demonstrative, who sang and laughed and enjoyed life and each other. After 1925 it was only a painful memory.
Psychologists of today would have a laundry list of impairments that our parent’s childhood would have caused for them but on that sad homestead in McIntosh County, there was no time to bleed. Survival was the only goal.
Call it luck, or more likely a heavenly guided hand, one day Uncle Reinhold had his fill of abuse and, as he told it, without much forethought he simply mounted his horse and left home with only the clothes on his back. He was 21-years-old and chose emancipation rather than wait for the stepfather to find a moral code and help his stepson get established with some acreage, machinery and livestock, as was the tradition in our Germans from Russia culture.

That act of courage in 1932 shaped the future of all the “Berlin” Just descendants. We owe a debt of gratitude to our Uncle Reinhold for breaking out of the cycle of abuse. For taking a stand, setting an example and paving the way for two more brothers, Julius and Ephraim to leave. We cousins often marvel about the statistics declaring that abuse breeds abuse. We children never encountered it. That is a tribute to our fathers’ early exposure to Karl and Katharina's happy marriage, to loving parenting, and to their own fine marital choices.

Uncle Reinhold found employment working for Friedrich and Christina (Weisser) Eckman, emigrants to McIntosh Country from Kassel, in South Russia. Both sets of his grandparents emigrated from the same village many years earlier. The Eckman family took Uncle Reinhold in to their home and the healing of his soul began.

Uncle Reinhold fell hard for their daughter, Lydia. They married in September of 1933, when he was 22 and she was 19, and for the next 70 years he never wavered in his devotion to her.

The new couple needed to be on their own. The Great Depression was in full swing and unemployment high. Drought conditions made cattle feed scarce and good farming acreage was hard to find. Uncle Reinhold took a wagon and a team of horses 70 miles east to LaMoure County to find hay for cattle feed and to look up a relative who had taken his family to farm in that area.

Once during a visit with him, Uncle Reinhold shared his memory of that trip. “I had never been out of McIntosh County and I didn’t speak English very well. I think I had a quarter or two in my pocket so I couldn’t afford a place to stay. I camped out under the stars that first night. I was so lonely for Lydia, for my parents and my siblings that I cried myself to sleep.”

Needless to say, that first trip to LaMoure County altered the rest of his life – and ours. Aunt Lydia and Uncle Reinhold found some acreage to rent near Cottonwood Lake, the first of several rented farmsteads, until they saved enough to make a down payment on the old Ness farm, ½ mile northwest of Berlin. When I asked him why they bought that farm, he replied, “So our children could walk to school.” Such was their desire to ensure a better life for their descendants.



Lydia with Clarence and Dennis, late 1930's



Uncle Reinhold encouraged his brothers, Ephraim and Julius, to leave McIntosh County, while scouting land for them to purchase. By 1944, the three brothers and their families were settled in close proximity of one another.

Over the decades, frugality, making-do, leaps-of-faith, and a shared goal of financial independence made success a reality for Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia. She worked as hard as he did. He always valued her many talents and they made most decisions jointly. My generation pointed to them as the standard for a good marriage. Theirs was a mixture of loyalty, endearment, acceptance and genuine caring. I delighted in watching them interact and stay the course together and I never tired of their playful banter with one another.



Lydia with Harold 1945

 They delighted in their sons and daughters-in-law, and cherished their grandchildren. All nieces and nephews were special. I kept my role as “their girl” through my adulthood and I always felt their unconditional love. All of us owe Uncle Reinhold a debt of thanks for his courage that day in 1932. His decision to change the course of his life altered our future as well. He would be uncomfortable with any kind of “hero” status. But for me, Uncle Reinhold will always be a hero.



Reinhold and Lydia with sons, Dennis, Harold and Clarence



Reinhold and Lydia in mid 1980's



Prairie Lights   March 2011

Prairie Gambler

Summer days of my girlhood on the prairie were longer than the nights.   

The land is how we made our living. In addition to planting a thousand acres of wheat, oats, barley, flax and corn, we had livestock for market and our dinner table and a large garden to ensure a well-stocked cellar.

The land produces, but only in cooperation with the weather. Farmers cannot assume they are in control. Farmers are the ultimate gamblers.

My dad was a farmer who lived in tune with the land and weather. He relied on instinct, experience and a dialogue with the heavens to guide his farming decisions.

Every spring a farmer must decide when, what and where to plant. He makes a commitment to the land and must lovingly tend and cultivate that crop through the growing season. Upon harvest, decisions begin all over again. What fields to harvest first, when to sell, where to store it and, because a farmer must race against time, whether to hire custom combine crews to help with the harvest.

A typical harvest day meant early breakfast when Dad would dictate which son worked which field. Noon meals, often eaten in the fields, included consultation about soil conditions, yields, machinery repair and often a call for “Who’s available to run to town for machinery parts?” The workday ended with a late supper when the day was assessed and plans were made for the next day.

In memory, such days were always tension charged, as our financial future lay ready for harvest. Everyone worked together, always with an eye to the sky. We all shared the concern, but Dad carried the load.

The North Dakota horizon is endless. Even on our farm where the groves of trees called “shelterbelts” ran north and south, east and west, one could see for miles, hear the distant rumble of thunder and wait to see if the crops we had tended and nurtured were at risk by the hand of nature.

After supper Dad parked himself on the front steps searching the sky for weather signs. A farmer knows that the clouds above could turn dark and dangerous, or that the quiet stillness and extreme heat might easily bump into a Canadian front, resulting in unpleasant weather activity that could cripple the harvest, or worse, destroy the crop.

Dad smoked one cigarette after another, the roll-your-own kind made from a can of tobacco in his front pocket - Sir Walter Raleigh or Prince Albert - his royalty of choice. Fred, the loyal collie dog, tail wagging by his side, was tuned to his master’s mood and scanned the sky, growling or whining his opinion while Dad prayed for a clear sky to bless the harvest.

Our financial future was at the mercy of the heavens. No radar weather station was available to predict our fate.

A day that often began at 6 a.m. might not end until Dad surrendered his sky-watch on the front steps long after twilight.

Dad relied on instinct. Perhaps he consulted my mother regarding farm decisions, I don’t remember. My brothers were included in farm discussions as were my uncles on neighboring farms, but the final decisions belonged to Dad. He operated on raw courage and took huge risks. By his own admission, it worked well and he encountered his share of luck. But I believe that his personal success hinged most of all on his attitude. You see, Dad loved his work and accepted with dignity and without complaint whatever fate the heavens declared.

That is the most important lesson we children learned from our dad, the PRAIRIE GAMBLER.

Carol Just – Prairie lights - 2011

Prarie Seasons

As a young girl growing up on the North Dakota prairie, the cycle of life revolved around the seasons.

Baby lambs came in February, calves in March and the furry, yellow baby chicks arrived by train in April. All that new life kept us occupied, no matter what kind of weather Mother Nature handed us.

In the middle of all that new life the Gurney and Burpee seed catalogues arrived. Nights were still long and late winter snowfalls left a blanket of moisture in preparation for earth’s thaw and the promise of new plant life.

Tulips and daffodils peeked their way through the soil closest to the farmhouse foundation by the time our mail carrier delivered the garden seeds. By then Mother’s garden blueprint was nearly complete and I remember an extra bounce in her step as she planted and tended her large gardens.

Another vivid memory is of Uncle Albert and the annual potato planting tradition – often on Good Friday if Easter came late that year. On that day the entire community refrained from hard work. Planting potatoes might be a muddy endeavor, but it was not considered hard work. “Place them in the ground ‘eye-up’ and we’ll be eating new potatoes by the 4th of July,” said Uncle Albert.

The youngest son of immigrant parents with one foot in the old country while striding into a new century, Uncle Albert, was spurned by his first love and never married. Coming of age between two world wars, Uncle Albert was a gentle soul who watched his older cousins come home from war torn Europe with mustard gas weakened lungs and he grieved for them. Inheriting his acreage at age 21, he worked the land for a few years, but like so many he surrendered it to the events of The Great Depression. The next decades were spent on the road, first as a carnival worker crossing the Great Plains with his carnival family. “I ran the Ferris Wheel for 17 years,” he said. Later, there was employment with the Northern Pacific Railroad, carrier of Dakota wheat and coal, but abruptly halted by a near fatal accident, long hospitalization and a cash settlement meant to ease his old age, but spent on dreams and drink to deaden the pain in his heart.

So Uncle Albert spent his golden years living with a variety of nieces and nephews. My extended family embraced a tradition of caring for family, with dignity and love. I was an adolescent when Uncle Albert took his turn with us.

Treated as a respected family elder, Uncle Albert helped mother with the garden and domestic chores, assisted dad in the day-to-day farm operation and showed us children how he rolled his own cigarettes while he shared stories of his life “on the road”.

Thus it was Uncle Albert’s fate and our good fortune that we spent our childhood years hearing his stories and enjoying multi-generational family life on the prairie. Why even now, I imagine Uncle Albert is smiling down from his heavenly perch saying, “Place them in the ground ‘eye-up’ and you’ll be eating new potatoes by the Fourth of July.”

Carol Just, Prairie Lights, March 2011